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Darth Chaltab

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21-Mar-2004
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6-Jan-2011
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Post
#189842
Topic
Jesus Cartoon controversy
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/189842/action/topic#189842
Time
Originally posted by: sybeman
The artist says that he drew the cartoon because he felt that they were right to not publish the Mohammed cartoons, and never expected them to publish this one either. I just wanted to get the whole thing off my chest, and maybe start some discussion.


Well, it can certainly be argued that publishing the Mohammed cartoons wasn't RESPONSIBLE, but it was in no way, shape, or form ILLIEGAL. Those that did riot have no ethical or legal grounds to stand on whatsoever; I don't care what is taboo in your religion--you DON'T start killing people over it, not in a civilized society.
Post
#189748
Topic
Story Time!
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/189748/action/topic#189748
Time
Chapter Eight: The Pirate Ship

It was about seven hours in warp-flight at an unknown speed before Sarah felt the shuttle revert into normal space. She had been lying on the cot in the empty quarters, drifting in and out of sleep. She had to prepare again, now, for her performance as Kiva Andur.
Sarah made her way into the cockpit, wary of the possibility that her cover was already blown. Thex was in the pilot’s seat, with the Noth’xal woman beside him. Sarah took a moment to study Mishi Xoluniti. She was about 5 feet tall, with a light brown fur covering most of her body. Her exposed midriff was covered in white fur, and in some places the colors collided and mixed. Her most notable attire was the numerous slots and straps in her clothing filled with knives and guns.

Thex was a rather plain human in his early thirties. He had bleached-white hair, and wore some drab olive-green pants and a faded brown vest over a salmon-red shirt. There were no obvious weapons on his person, but Sarah assumed he had at least a knife or small gun concealed somewhere in his attire.
“So, the amazon has finally come out of hibernation,” said Thex when he perceived that she was in the room. “Just hailed the Blian and we’re clear to dock. Anything you want to bring, get it now.”
Sarah nodded almost imperceptibly. “All my things were vaped with my spaceboat.”
Thex looked up at the woman he thought was Kiva. “Right.”

Sarah looked out the viewport at the long slender silver object in the distance. So. This was the famous pirate vessel that had been evading authorities for years. It was an RPO-377 Viego-class frigate. Iien Blian, which meant “Prosperous Future.”, was captained by the notorious Juan Cortez. Cortez had been a student at the Confederate military academy on Randeraal where he had lost his right eye in a training exercise. He still graduated with honors, and became the commander of a small but powerful flotilla in the Confederate Navy. After his crew had been massacred near the start of the fourth Galactic War, he and a few survivors had started a pirate ring to cut in on the established powers of Tyf, Soron, and Yee. Why he abandoned his career for piracy, no one could explain.
Sarah glanced down at the distance gauge and her mouth almost fell open. Twenty thousand kilozivits? That couldn’t be right. If that were the distance then that ship would have to be almost 2000 meters long! Sarah then realized she had never seen a Viego outside of old documentaries. It never registered to her that a pirate vessel could be so large. It was obvious then that Cortez was running no small operation. He was truly a force to be reckoned with in the galaxies criminal element. It was another fifteen minutes before the shuttle Lyberia finally set down in the Blian’s 5-D docking bay. Mishi went on a head to reassume her role as Cortez’s personal bodyguard, and

Kiva was becoming anxious.

Geshin understood why. After blotching a mission that was worth so much money to the captain and Kiva, Cortez would probably chew the Slin out of her. Not that verbal abuse ever fazed Kiva Andur, but the Captain had other methods. If his pet, the Majis Flying-Lizard he called Torval were to spit its venom onto her skin, Kiva would suffer for days in the most exquisite agony that Thex new of. He had felt it himself once when he panicked and ran after the police showed up during a mission. Sure he saved twenty lives, but the captain’s cousin had been killed. And to Cortez, family often took precedence over economics.
The back hatched opened and formed the boarding ramp, and Geshin and Kiva stepped off and were greeted by the powers that be. Cortez’s first mate, Kelly Hulin, stood right the captain in her pale-skinned scantily clad splendor. Mishi took his left flank, eyes alert for any sign of treachery, even among the crew. The weapons officer, a half Vurkan that everyone called Private Ishori, stood back near the door opening onto the corridor, her enourmous positron bazooka in hand.
“Ah, Kiva,” Cortez started in his characteristic accented English, “it is good to see that your are unharmed. I had heard more than one report that you were dead.”
“I’m hard to kill,” Kiva returned with her typical nonchalant arrogance. Typical… Whatever had been afflicting her earlier seemed to be gone.
“Yes. The same was said of Temula Path, my friend.” Now it was on. “I told you to go alone. I specifically said that taking anyone, especially a Ki’lail, would endanger the mission. And now, by her absence, It seems that Path is dead.” Cortez calm tone hardly hid the fact that he was furious.
“Maybe you’re warning is why I took her,” Kiva retorted, looking the captain straight in his eye. “Maybe I wanted to know exactly what it is you were buying…”
“Shut up,” this came from the first officer, Kelly Hulin. “What happened happened. We can’t be at each other’s throats when we have a job tomorrow.” Hulin glared at Kiva with her typical contempt.

Kelly was really jealous, constantly fearing that Cortez would opt to replace her with Kiva. But she also knew that an attack on a major target within 30 could never go well with the captain’s brains splattered on the docking-bay floor, so she ultimately knew what she was doing. The captain simply nodded and dismissed everyone gathered. As the guards and crew filed out, Ishori and Kiva shared their customary embrace. Geshin thought he would be sick.

Sarah thought she would have collapsed and began crying if the confrontation with Cortez had gone on any longer. Sarah was already self-conscious enough with her outfit, which showed a great deal more skin than Sarah found comfortable. Her outfit was basically an armored sports bra with oversized shoulder plates. Her stomach was exposed, revealing the scar across her upper abdomen, recreated by the medical bots in painstaking detail from Kiva’s own body. Her bare arms also displayed duplicated scars, and the right leg of her synthe-leather pants was cut out to display the scar on the front of her thy.

Most unsettling of all, however, was hate-filled stare of Kelly Hulin. It had really gotten to her. Sarah didn’t know exactly why Kiva was so hated by the first officer, but she realized it would make her job harder already having enemies. She should have known that Kelly was that way, from all the times Kiva had referred to her with or as various obscenities in her journal.
So, Lt. Steele was more than glad when the Vurkan woman called Private Ishori greeted her warmly. This young Vurkan was the only person in the galaxy that Kiva considered her friend. She looked up at Sarah with her young and vulnerable features. To Sarah, it didn’t seem right that someone who looked so innocent should be the weapons officer on a pirate vessel.
“Kiva!” the Vurkan said with surprising enthusiasm. “I’m glad you’re back.”
“Private,” Sarah started, trying not to sound awkward., “have you always been this hyper?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Ishori faked hurt. “You didn’t even send me anything while you were gone. Does that mean you’ve forgotten me?”
“How could I forget someone as insane as you?” Sarah dodged. She said it with a smile perceptible enough that Ishori would take it as a joke. Still, even then, she couldn’t seem to make the trace of suspicion in the Vurkan’s eyes disappear.

It was only several hours later that Sarah finally had the opportunity to relax. She had long know of a way to radiate her ki and psi together to make a form of radiation capable of disrupting security cameras, which she did until she removed the technological version of the same practical application from the blit in the sole of her boot.. Once that was set up, she went about writing in her log, and taking in as much of Kiva’s journal as she could. It was tedious work sometimes, but if General Hammock, one of the most distinguished in the Empire, believed this was important, then it probably was. Her mission might even be important to Jim’s, whatever it was, or vice versa.
Sarah sat up on the couch in Andur’s surprisingly vivid quarters. For someone so cold-blooded, her quarters were surprisingly non-Spartan. The walls were a brown-tinged orange, not bright enough to offend the eyes; the furnishings were cushioned with various shades of warm colors, save the green sofa in one corner. Sarah actually liked it.

The door-alarm began to chime, so Sarah quickly tapped the quip containing Kiva’s outfit and discarded it before she got to the door. When it slid away, she found Ishori, in a teal leather dress that was much more elegant attire than the typical scant-but-efficient outfits that Cortez supplied for his female crewmembers. Still, it wasn’t something that Sarah would wear in public.
“Hey Kiva. Are you coming to the party in the officer’s mess? I doubt that the captain would be pleased if you didn’t show up. He’s already got it out for you as it is.”
“I think I would rather stay here. I’m… practicing,” Sarah replied, with inadvertent rudeness.
“Practicing what? Sure as daucht ain’t your social skills. You’ve been reclusing ever since you got here. Everybody messes up now and then.. If you’d stop obsessing over your mistake, it wouldn’t be so bad. Your acting just like you did after Tol’Gil’fa. I’m surprised you’re still even on the ship. It isn’t like you’re gonna get paid.”
“Fine,” Sarah relented, wanting to change the subject from the unknowns of Kiva’s past. “I’ll go to the party. But if Kelly or Cortez says a word about Texas, or Tem, there will be Slin to pay.”

As Sarah started towards the electronic wardrobe to see what “nice” outfits Kiva left on the ship, she began to wonder what she had gotten herself into for the thousandth time that evening.

Captain Cortez stood silently in the mess hall, with Kelly Hulin and his bodyguard Mishi. He took another drink of his Jomaniani ale, ironically a gift from the woman who was the topic of much negative discussion as of late. Kiva had seemed off, certainly, until he had confronted her about the death of Tem. Then she had reverted to her typical insolent self.

But his first officer Kelly Hulin didn’t seem to be convinced.
“There is something going on here,” the woman insisted. “There is no way that that was the same Kiva Andur we sent to Texas.”
Geshin Thex, the navigation officer, looked around and then addressed Hulin directly. “So what are you saying? You think that she’s some sort of android or clone come to lead the cops to us?”
“No. I think she was captured, and offered a pardon for betraying us, honestly.”
“Ridiculous,” Cortez interjected. “There are no homing emissions coming from her or any of her things, and if she tries to contact someone off ship, we’ll detect it.” Cortez leaned back in his chair and considered for a long moment. “She is just obsessing over her failure. Every time she fails a mission she gets like this.”
Hulin turned away, muttering something as she left, but Cortez was honestly too drunk by this point to care. He took another drink as Kiva and Ishori walked in.

He’d keep an eye on her, just to be safe—assuming he still remembered this conversation tomorrow.


Post
#189747
Topic
Story Time!
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/189747/action/topic#189747
Time
Chapter Seven: Alliance Forged

There was light everywhere. It was so bright that he had to close his eyes. And when he did he could still see. He saw patterns of color that he knew, somehow, were people. There were fifteen in all. Five were far away, one dominated them all, alone standing. Three lay on the ground, and the fifth was somehow both suppressed and radiant. It was awesome. He looked closely and saw a another being. Right in front of him. And then the light and dark faded and reality reemerged.

Jim snapped awake, disoriented, confused. His eyes acted as though he just stared into bright light… As he regained his vision, he found himself in some kind of cave. Memory slowly returned, or it seemed slow, at least. He had reported back to Greglthf after learning of the cult on… Somu’e… Yes, that is where he was. Somu’e.

He had left Felt and arrived on the Confederate world by Thursday morning… he had tracked the woman…
Her name was Maurin Ueiva, a Ki’lail debutante who had a notorious history of vicious anti-Senarian rhetoric. She was purportedly about 40, but she looked much younger. And she had a feeling of one who had weathered the ages… In the way she spoke and carried herself. Jim couldn’t explain it, but she had a confidence that Jim had only seen before on the oldest of Senarians.
Jim had arrived just before her, it seemed, on her cult’s home base of Somu’e, and had spent most of Thursday afternoon tracking her down. He had followed her into a complex, mostly carved out of rock. … Where he was now. He had almost given up and turned back at an end that was apparently dead, when a convenient rock had fallen loose and revealed that the back wall was a hologram. He had gone through. He was on some sort of high-up balcony in a large auditorium, where the old Ki’lail had just been fried. And then he had blacked out…

He looked out over the assembly that had zapped the old man. He could barely conceal a gasp when he realized that the old man standing on the middle of the platform was no longer old. The Ki’lail looked no older than his early thirties now, and in the pit, his aids lay on the ground. He could tell even from the height of the upper level that that at least two of them were dead. The sapphire-haired three-eye man stood as if experiencing utter bliss, his eyes closed, smiling as if he’d just beaten the final boss of Triple-Super-Bot II Turbo. He opened his eyes and his smile faded. Ueiva had joined him in the room, but Jim didn’t realize until just then it because of a black obstruction…
A very black obstruction. It seemed to be hanging in mid-air, and it was a shape Jim found all-too-familiar. A Senarian battle visor silhouette, double the size of his own visor, could only mean one thing. There was someone here, also infiltrating, someone very much larger than Jim. Someone very much less human.

The Ki’lail man spoke now, looking dangerously in the direction of Jim and the invisible Senarian agent. “Hello, Jim Raynor and Najenkur Kehkz,” he said.

That shook Najenkur to her core. Somehow, he had been so empowered by the energy surging through his body, he saw Najenkur through her cloak field and anti-Psionic visor. But who was this Jim? She glanced back over her left shoulder and stared strait into the invisible face of the human infiltrator behind her, hinted at only by a visor barely three zivits long and one wide. She silently whispered a prayer of protection and launched to her feet. She no longer had any doubt she would have to kill to get out of here alive.
Tulva spoke again. “Yes. I know you are there. Both of you. I can assure you, even if you escape with your lives, you will never prevent us from destroying that which we hate. We have already won this fight.” He reached for the comlink that the magenta-haired woman had offered him. He raised it to his mouth and spoke. “Put the base on full alert, and deploy the EMP.”
Alarms began to blare and shortly after that, a surge ran through her cloaking device, shorting it out.. She turned and saw a human male, tall for one of his species. He drew his guns and cocked his head at an angle. “Well,” he said. “It looks like we are in for a fight.”

Jim and his unexpected ally, this Kehkz woman, bolted down the corridor they had used to enter the complex. The hologram was now not working since all the electronics in the base had just been fried. But that didn’t matter to either side. Jim had some very old-fashioned guns, and the Senarian’s gender identified her as a sword-wielding type. Male Senarians preferred energy blades, so Jim was thankful that she was a she.
Just as the pair had rounded the corner and stepped into a large circular room, the had to stop and dodge a pair of psi-lasers beaming from third eyes of the guards so easy to slip past before. Jim hit the floor, dodging left, and brought his guns up firing. He missed, and another laser streaked over his head. He rolled out from behind the rock to his right and squeazed off two rounds into the Smuell’s bulbous cranium. He fell, limp. Several other guards had joined the fight by now, however.
The Senarian woman leapt into the air and landed behind a new guard, her sword cutting him clean in half before her feet touched down. She turned to her right and defended against the laser from an old GW II-era blaster pistol.

Her sword glowed from the impact.

Being a kinetic sword, Jim knew it would cut better when it got hotter, brighter, or more electrically charged—and a laser blast would have all three of those effects.

Jim fired again at two newcomers with his sub-machine gun, tearing holes in their armor, or at least knocking them back a few steps. Jim launched himself behind another rock at the far end of the room, landing in a puddle of water. He fired across the cave at an attacker in the Senarian’s blind-side, and had the grim satisfaction of watching his lifeless body flip-over backwards. Why can’t the bad guys just run like cowards for a change?
Najenkur was now exchanging sword blows with a Ki’lail swordsman, the last of this group of attackers and about two-thirds as tall as the Senarian. The fact that he was holding his own told Jim he was good. Very good. Too good.

So, Jim shot him.
“What are you doing?!” Najenkur said. Screamed, really.
“Helping out,” Jim replied.
“Helping? You just shot a man who was engaged in a sword fight. That is on page one of the book of dishonorable warfare!”

Jim decided she was insane, but he could tell she was livid, so he apologized. “Sorry. I didn’t know it meant that much to you.” He surveyed the carnage that they had just wreaked on the guards. “We need to keep moving. They just might nuke the place,” he said at length. She stared daggers at Jim, but said nothing, so they started down the corridor together.

Najenkur had had to use her psi to open the doors on the way out, but there wasn’t much more fighting. Two guards waited at the exit, and she had split the first one down the middle herself with her two antiquated kalatani blades. She allowed the human to shoot the other. She couldn’t help but cringe at having to kill to survive, but she also knew that this was bigger than herself. What ever Tulva was doing, people were going to die if he succeeded.
“Well,” said the human. “What do we do now?”

What now indeed? She looked at the human, intently, and began to read his mind. By the end of the minute, she had determined that he was legitimate.
“First, we should tell each other who we are, and why we were in there. I am Lt. Colonel Najenkur Kehkz, North Confederation military. I was ordered to investigate this cult on the grounds that they may have developed or discovered a weapon capable of killing many in a terrorist act.”
“Then our missions are the same,” the human confirmed. “Lieutenant Jim Raynor, Imperial Army,” he saluted. He looked around. “We need to go somewhere safe if we’re going to talk. They might come back—maybe just to kill us.”

Within the hour, they were at a Confederate Military headquarters on Somu’e. Najenkur suggested that they should pool their knowledge about the Eyes of Vengeance and see what they could come up with together. After a while, their efforts, which included mining the exhaustive databanks of the Confederate Galaxy Network, turned up mostly nothing.
“Is there anything else you didn’t tell me? Anything that might give us a clue as to where to go next?” Even as Naj said the words, she just then noticed the exhaustion in her own voice.

The human lieutenant thought for a moment and said, “Well. She did say something about an ‘ancient weapon’ that was stolen by the Senarians. Something about the ‘Starless.’”

And that stopped Najenkur in her mental tracks. “A starless planet?” she asked.
“Maybe.” Jim replied. “The translator just said ‘the starless,’ whatever that means.”
Najenkur knew all to well what it could mean. She keyed in a search for “Et nama-kan” After a while, security clearance was required. Very high security. That meant she was making progress. She typed in her authorization, which was just barely adequate for the file. It was very old, dating back more than 1000 years; it was so old that much of the text was in Old Senarian, the Shakespeare version of the Senarian Language, if one wills. “Come over here,” she said to human.
“What’s up?” he asked.

“I don’t suppose you can read Senarian. This is an ancient document about an incident that mentions ‘the Starless’ and ‘the dead system.’ About 1200 years ago, during the Senarian war with the Xel Empire, the Xel purportedly had a weapon of immense power. According to this, my—A Senarian general captured the weapon and used it to ‘put-out’ the star in that system. The shockwave tore the inhabited world apart, killing millions.”
“How come we imperials have never heard that there is a weapon in Confederate space that can collapse stars?” Jim asked.
“I’ve never heard of this myself, Lt. Raynor. This isn’t common knowledge at all. I’ve heard legends all my life a starless planet that acts as an all-powerful weapon, but it is never given second thought. It is believed to be only a legend. And the stories have never mentioned genocide.

“Furthermore, it doesn’t say it collapsed the star. The way it’s worded, you get the sense that the star didn’t leave a black hole or anything; it is just gone. I don’t know what that means, but it is clear that if this is true, then this thing Tulva and Ueiva are after could destroy the Confederation.”

Jim considered this for a moment and then pointed to the four Senarian characters on the screen that she had been hoping to avoid explaining. He said, “Hey, that says ‘Kehkz,’ just like your last name. Relative of yours?”
“So you can read Senarian,” she dodged. “Yes, Pelenthou Kehkz is my ancestor. He—“
“He was the general who defeated the Xel,” Jim finished for her. “I know my military history, and Senarian Language is a required course at the academy. So basically, you’re saying that your ancestor committed genocide. No wonder Tulva feels so much hate for you.”
“You noticed? I don’t think I’ve ever felt that pure a hatred.” Najenkur thought about the bright light, and the transfiguration of Tulva, and how she could feel his unadulterated hate for her coursing through him, after learning her name during the brief seconds their minds bonded. She shuddered. Even this non-psionic human could feel it.

Jim took a closer look at the screen. “So what are the coordinates of the planet?” He inquired.
Naj sighed heavily. “They aren’t given, and I understand why. But I don’t know how it could remain hidden for so long. Even if there is no star, the light it has given off must just now be reaching the edge of the galaxy; it would be thousands of years before it is all gone. And if there is starlight, someone will undoubtedly jump there, if for no better reason than to hide from police.”
“Maybe it is obstructed, or something.”
“If it was near the edge or core of the galaxy possibly, but we can’t just jump towards ever pinpoint of light we see.”
Najenkur looked up to see Jim tinkering with a small electronic device at the table across the room. “What is that she asked?”
He turned the device on and smiled. “It is a tracking device,” he said. “Tuned to the frequency of the homing beacon that I put on Tulva’s ship before I entered the base.”
“Well,” Naj said with a wry smile, “It is as good of a next-step as I can think of.”



Post
#189745
Topic
Story Time!
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/189745/action/topic#189745
Time
Chapter Six: An Act of Deception

It was Friday evening by the time Sarah was ready for her ultimate mission. The mission that would test ever element of her training and force her to suppress her very personality and compassion. She had had to prepare physically, first. Ever identifying mark on her body had to be removed. And then she had to be scarred. Prosthetics wouldn’t work. The scars were carefully reconstructed to the smallest detail.

And it hurt like daucht. The voice was simpler. A set of nano-bots that Sarah inhaled moved and stretched her vocal cords just enough to perfectly emulate the voice. But the first step had been the surgery. Her cheekbones had been raised to match those of whom she impersonated. Her lower jaw had been altered to hide the fact that it was sharper than it should be. And after three days of surgery Sarah had physically become the mercenary Kiva Andur of Jomanian.
Becoming her mentally was even harder. The blit that was hidden in the mercenary’s body had contained of all things a digi-journal. From it, the imperials had reconstructed every minute detail of Kiva’s relationship with the pirate ship Iien Blian. Or so they hoped. Sarah had determined from her own readings that Kiva rarely stayed on the ship for more than a day at a time. She had only one person on it that she trusted, a half-Vurkan called “Private Ishori.” Kiva had been sent to Laredo City, the capital of planet Texas, to extract a set of stellar coordinates from a three-eyed thug named Sirius White.

The deal had gone bad when her companion Tem Path had read White’s mind. Appearantly, Kiva wanted to know what the coordinates were for and, rather than asking politely, had invited White’s wrath in the form of a psionic virus that had eventually killed Path. In their hide-away, a broken down hospital in the Rio Grande district, Path had relayed to Kiva the info that she had learned from White. Unfortunately, the nature of that data was encrypted on the data cards that were in the blit. So, Sarah had to go convince complete strangers that she was a cruel merc that they knew personally and figure out what the significance of all this was. No problem.
Sarah stepped out into the docking bay from the side room. Among other things, Kiva had left the coordinates for rendezvous with the Iien Blian and much invaluable information about Kiva’s routine while on the ship. From all that the intelligence team at Laredo could determine, Kiva never would spend more than two days on the ship at a time, to avoid being around when and if the law discovered the pirates. Yalm Wessil and General Hammock stepped forward from the middle of the bay.

“Lieutenant,” said Hammock, “I’m not even going to give you any warnings. You have a job to do, and it is time you go do it. Good luck.”
Now Wessil said, “Have you memorized the layout of the ship? You know where to go if you’re told to go to your quarters or your battle station?”
“Yes to all three,” Said Sarah. The voice that came from her mouth surprised her. She would never adapt to having tiny machines manipulate her vocal cords to the pitch and octave of Kiva Andur’s voice. The latest model left only the faintest trace of mechanical feedback, so small it could only be detected by machines knowing exactly what to look for. Needless to say, speaking with another’s voice was quite disconcerting to Sarah, but she would have to get used to it. “I’m ready,” Sarah said at length.

She approached Kiva’s space boat that sat docked in Bay 5 of the Imperial Frigate Enforcer. It was of Senarian design, which made good sense, Andur being from the Confederate world of Jomanian. Sarah inserted everything she thought she would need into the blit in her boot, and anything that Kiva would likely bring into the blit in her thy. It was the same one in the real Andur’s thy, disinfected after removal, of course. It was quite unnerving to have metal where muscle should be. A dormant tracking device had been installed in Kiva’s leg along with a newer model of her implanted blit. Sarah knew that hoping that Kiva would be dumb enough not to remove the tracking device was wishful thinking. Veijan mercenaries didn’t survive as pirates without being very good, and very good meant intelligent as well. That was, of course, if she could be restored to her body.

In less than fifteen minutes, Sarah was ready to take off. She fired up the boat’s sub-light engines and maneuvered out of the docking bay and made for open space. Within another five minutes, Sarah had clearance to jump to the rendezvous point. She set the coordinates and activated the warp drive, and set back to prepare mentally for the deception while the stars elongated and became the vast blue torrent called hyperspace. It was a 2-day flight to the rendezvous point, near her own home planet New Jersey. She emerged from hyperspace near a worthless frozen rock called Yellana. There weren’t many ships in the system, but the few that were there were maintaing a discrete distance from each other. One in particular caught Sarah’s eye. It was a large shuttle, capable of making Warp-Ten easily. And its transponder code matched that of the shuttle that she was supposed to be meeting here. Sarah switched on a comm. channel and hailed the shuttle Lyberia.

“Lyberia, this is Kiva. Requesting permission to dock.”
“Phoenix! Why aren’t you using your code name?” Came the hasted response from the shuttle commander. Wonderful. Fifteen seconds in and she already made a huge mistake.
“Calm down,” came Sarah’s improvisational reply. “There aren’t any cops for three hundred terra-zivits. I’m not that stupid.” She said it with enough harshness and frustration to not sound apologetic.
“Cops? Phoenix, I ain’t worried about the daucht police. I am thinking that if any of the competition learns who you are, they’ll end our party real quick.” And sure enough, several of the other pirate vessels had set a course for the shuttle. “Never mind, they’re already on there way,” the shuttle pilot added.

“I can handle this,” Sarah shot back with the brash arrogance that one would expect from a mercenary as accomplished as Andur. Sarah did some tinkering and eventually got the reactor to go critical. She set a course directly for the nearest pirate vessel at ramming speed... Any one else, and this would be suicide, unless the shuttle had a transporter. But not Sarah. She knew a few maneuvers.
Placing her index and middle finger together on her forehead, and ignoring the frantic protests of the shuttle’s pilot, Sarah reached out with her life sense ability, the ability to feel other peoples’ ki. She focused on the pilot of the shuttle. Human male, fairly weak, but strong enough for this to work. Sarah pulsated energy around her body, her latent psionic power from her distant Ki’lail heritage and her ki from her less distant Veijan ancestry. And suddenly she was gone, removed forcefully, atom-by-atom, from the doomed space boat. Her vision, indeed all of her physical sense, was gone, but she could feel herself floating through the void of space, drifting closer toward her target. And then reality flooded back over her as she snapped back into a physical existence. Looking at her wrist-clock, she saw that it took 5 minutes to get from A to B at the speed of light.

And then she saw the terrified shuttle pilot swing a blunt object at her. She dodged down and to the right, lifted both her arms in defense, and smacked the man hard enough in the chest to send him staggering back two yards. “You moron. It’s me!”
“Kiva! How the Slin did you get her?”

“Something I picked up on Haven once. Never thought I’d have to use it.” At least the first half of that was true, Sarah told herself. “Now shut up and get us the Slin out of here!” She didn’t feel right swearing when not angry, but she wasn’t playing the part of a moral character.

Just then, a flash outside the cockpit fortiglass confirmed the destruction of the spaceboat. Whether it took any of the pirate ships with it wasn’t important anymore, although for the sakes of the pirates, Sarah hoped that they had noticed the unstable reactor and shot it down before it was close enough to vaporize them. She wasn’t on a mission to slaughter pirates.
By the time the two got into the cockpit, Sarah had recollected the name of the pilot, Geshin Thex, from the journal. Thex flicked some switches and a holographic display showed the position of shuttle Lyberia in relation to the other objects in the system. The pirate vessels had taken the hint and backed off, but there was one large ship that hadn’t broken pursuit, and it had deployed many smaller objects.
“Fighters,” said Thex. “At least 40 of them, coming in from starboard aft.” He switched on the auto-turrets and said to Sarah, “Kiva, take the main gun. I’ll get us ready. They’ll be here in 10 minutes, but it will take at least twelve to get into a clear vector. We’ll have to fight them.”

Sarah stumbled her way to the gun labeled main and climbed the ladder into the swivel seat. She waited there for ten minutes, silently preparing to kill in the name of self-defense. Then the fighters arrived and the time for moral dilemmas was over. The first flight of 12 fighters was closing in from all angles. Suddenly, Thex shifted the shuttle into high gear, and they took off. Sarah aimed carefully and riddled the nearest fighter with fire from her gun. It was a Tye beam-machinegun, and had a very fast rate of fire. In an instant, the first target erupted into a ball of fire and there were 11 left. The aft dorsal gun suddenly flared to life and Sarah saw that there was a Noth’xal woman manning the backup weapon. Had she been on the ship the whole time?

Lasers lanced out from her gun and in a minute there were seven enemy fighters left.

The kitty was good.
Then the shuttle went into a complex series of rolls and spins—evasive maneuvers—that nearly caused Sarah to loose her last meal. She set the inertial dampener in her gun to max and set the turret display to ignore the dizzying starfield. A second target crossed her cross hairs and it was quickly vaporized as well. Finally the fighters were close enough to make out details. They were Zurro class, modified heavily. Sarah had fought their kind before, and there was really nothing to it. The fact that they were the alpha squadron said a lot about the pirates that used them. Two flashes denoted the destruction of two more fighters by the Noth’xal woman. Four left.
The photon cannons on the fighters activated and the display was suddenly filled with red lines denoting enemy attacks. The shuttle began dodging wildly and Sarah found the source of one of the streams of harmful energy and squeezed the trigger. Energy lanced out in tiny glowing bullets of doom and that fighter was dead. Sarah saw his remains drift out of the ball of wreckage. Then there was a violent shake and the side of the shuttle was venting atmosphere. That means the shields are breached, Sarah thought. She then started firing wildly at the three remaining ships and the Noth woman did so as well. Two bright flashes and then another violent hit. The fighter dropped underneath the shuttle where Sarah and the skilled feline couldn’t shoot him. He was undoubtedly the leader. Or maybe just the smartest of the bunch.

The shuttle shuddered and started to flip, but was rocked back the other way by a concussive blast to the ventral shields. Well, at least those still work. Then the fighter shot back up and bee-lined it for the pirate vessel. It was only after that Sarah realized the drives were no longer working.

Then they came to life again. Sarah knew the tactic well. Make an enemy incapable of capturing your ship think you were disabled, then get out of there before the reinforcements could arrive.

The leader had almost rejoined the main body of fighters when Sarah took careful aim and prayed Lord, make my aim true. She switched the cannon to focus mode, so rather than gatlin-like energy balls, it would shoot a golden spear of destructive light. Then she squeezed the trigger and waited for the results. With in five seconds, the fighter exploded and the remaining fighters of the original forty retreated, taking the hint loud and clear.

Sarah powered down the gun as the stars elongated and light was outraced. She slipped back into the cockpit with the Noth’xal, who the journal identified as Mishi Xoluniti.

“So, Thex,” she said, “what has Cortez been up to while I was gone?”
“Don’t be so friendly, Kiva.” Geshin said it with such derision, that Sarah knew Kiva must be ranked lower than he. “The captain is livid, Kiva. You blotched a mission, and cost the captain a lot of money.”
“Daucht,” Sarah swore in character, “That klitching Ki’lail that I was supposed to pay killed Tem Path and would’ve killed me.”
“The captain also told you to go alone. He doesn’t like his instructions being ignored.” This time Thex’s tone suggested he was trying to trap Sarah. If she were already suspected a fake, things would get difficult. If he trapped her here, and didn’t let her know, she was as good as dead.
Sarah shrugged and said, “Did he?” She figured it was about the best non-committal response she could give in this situation.
“You ought to pay more attention, Andur. You don’t get paid to klatch-up”
Sarah was tired from the fight and already perturbed by almost blowing cover. She left the cockpit, throwing a comment about a long day over her shoulder, and headed back to the barest of the three quarters, presumably the one not used by Thex or Mishi. She collapsed on the bunk and drifted off to sleep.

Geshin Thex looked up at Mishi, his copilot and bodyguard. They were both likely thinking the same thing, and there was no point in not bringing it up with her. “Is it just me or does Kiva seem.. um.. off today?”
“Other than I’ve never seen her so accurate in a turret, then not really,” came the Noth’xal’s answer.
“Yeah, but I meant the call. You really believe she forgot to use her call sign? And what of the reports of her death?”
“Well, she is obviously not dead, and… Well, look who speaks. You yourself have neglected the use of your call sign on numerous occasions.”

She had a point.

“Eh… maybe it’s just the adrenaline,” said Thex as he activated the autopilot.
Post
#189742
Topic
Jesus Cartoon controversy
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/189742/action/topic#189742
Time
I'm certainly not thrilled about it, but it's a cartoon. What can you do? They have a right to post it just like the Danes had a right to publish what they did.

See, this is a difference between the terrorists and everyone else. Americans shrug and go "that's disgusting"... THEY get angry and go out and kill people.

http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/4905/bigmo8ij.jpg
How can anybody kill a man over something this hilarious?

Another element of the Danish cartoons is that they were actually TRUTHFUL. They made a point, and they were, IMO, quite humorous. This pig cartoon you mentioned was just for shock value, it seems. There is no underlying "hidden" honesty in Jesus effing a pig. It's just crass and stupid. But, well, not all, but especially the one above DOES point out a ridiculous element to the suicide bombers.
Post
#189267
Topic
Serenity
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/189267/action/topic#189267
Time
Maybe the series takes place over a period of seven months or so, and the movie takes place a month after the end of the series.

In situations like this, what is stated in canon (the canon length of time between Trash and Our Mrs. Reynolds) should count more than what promotional materials say.

Like the levels of canon in Star Wars.
Post
#189230
Topic
Street Fighter vs Mortal Kombat
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/189230/action/topic#189230
Time
Originally posted by: ricarleite
It wouldn't be possible with Mortal Kombat. Apart from the 3D ones, the characters were always actors filmed. Also, the game play is not very similar with Street Fighter - would you imagine a SF character doing a Finish Him or a Mortal Kombat character doing one of those combos?


Hence my whole "in the mold of Street Fighter" line. I was actually reffering to literally redrawing all included MK characters as sprites with unique animations and everything. Speaking of which, I wonder what characters from the MK Verse it would have?

Scoripion undoubtedly, Sub-Zero. Though Sub-Zero might be too powerful.

Then again, if an Ubmermensch like HaohMaru can make it into CVS2, I don't guess SubZero has a problem...